Compensation of modulation distortion in microwave radio-over-fiber systems using chromatic dispersion

Although deep optical modulation in radio over fiber systems increases signal to noise ratio of fiber links, it causes signal distortion due to modulator nonlinearity. We report our system experiment on the compensation of the nonlinear distortion using chromatic dispersion. The bit error rate of 10.5-GHz 16-QAM signals that deeply modulated the optical carrier showed a significant decrease by applying a proper amount of chromatic dispersion, confirming our analytical predictions.